When marketing for schools, you should be making the most of all the Web analytics and Web marketing tools available to you. Google produces some of the most popular products to measure the Return on Investment (ROI ) of your marketing initiatives and increase the number of leads from your website. These include:

• Google AdWords
• Google Analytics
• Google Places
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google website optimizer

Here is a rundown of what each Google product can offer you:

Google AdWords

Google AdWords remains fundamental to Web marketing for schools. It is an auction-driven pay per click advertising tool, which enables advertisers to reach potential students who are using keyword searches to find program pages.

Google AdWords involves placing ads or sponsored listings related to keyword searches on Google’s results page, which can help schools generate leads and traffic for specific programs. Right now, Google AdWords has the biggest market share among PPC tools.

Google Analytics

If you are not using Web analytics, your school is missing out on key information and data that can help colleges and universities measure the ROI of their marketing activities, both online and offline. Google Analytics’ main benefit is user adoption: it’s the most commonly used Web analytics tool and it’s free.

Plus, Google Analytics is software as a service model, so you don’t have to install, maintain or host anything. Google does it all.

Google Places

Mobile and local search is becoming an increasingly important marketing tactic for schools and Google Places helps manage your listing on Google Maps.

Businesses may have a single place on Google Maps, but it gets a bit more complicated with schools that sometimes have multiple campuses. In that case, a school should have listings on the map for each campus. Google Places gives schools control over those listings, allowing them to upload pictures, content, videos, ratings and reviews.

Google Webmaster Tools

This is a tool that webmasters use to get technical information on how the Google crawlers perceive your school’s site and how they will relate information back in terms of errors, opportunities, and top keywords.

The benefit to Google Webmaster Tools is more organic visibility on the SEO side, as it can give your school the ability to submit an xml sitemap and get crawl errors, popular keywords, click through data, and many other important SEO data points.

Google Website

Optimizer Google Website Optimizer gives colleges and universities the opportunity to do split A/B or multi-variate testing.

Once your school has defined its website marketing goals, and it’s clear what every department wants people to do on your website, your school can create variations of the same page and test each one scientifically. Google Website Optimizer will then tell you which variation provides more conversions. This will remove the guesswork involved in website design and optimization and help improve your school’s ROI and online lead generation.